At a recent marketing and public relations conference held by PRIMA-NC, I presented on the topic of mobile technologies in colleges and higher education markets. I shared a general vision of emerging trends and provided some low cost practical applications of mobile to marketing, communications, teaching and learning. One topic of particular interest seemed to be managing QR codes.

Managing QR Codes? Yes! I likened QR codes to web addresses / URLs. These odd-looking barcoding images transport mobile users to content and they must be managed or they will break. Broken QR codes are parallel to broken links and ruin a user’s experience. Managing them allows us to identify, track and hopefully fix any broken mobile experiences.

Picking a Tool. Not all QR code creation tools are strewn across the www and many are not worth wasting time on IMO. Many of the tools out there offer very little benefit and many of them come at a cost. Now, for the sake of this conference, I simply did not have time to present a long list of pay-for options and differences so I instead focused on one very flexible and FREE QR code option that anyone can benefit from — a little company called “GOOGLE.” You may have heard of them.

The Geeky Approach Through Google APIs. Many are simply not aware that QR codes are included as part of Google’s charting APIs. With a very small amount of “geek” knowledge, one can be easily create and manipulate QR codes using a simple query string. You may also be able to use these options to enhance your existing online services and content management systems (CMS). Geeks, you’ll like this flexible option and also note that there are some other pretty cool custom charts and effects that you can produce if you dig into what they make available to developers. It doesn’t take much to produce some pretty interesting effects and dynamic content for your websites.

Not-So-Geeky Approach. If you’re not a “geek” and aren’t interested in *that* much flexibility but more in simplicity, Google’s URL shortener “goo.gl” is a perfect option for you. The shortener includes a QR code with each URL shortened and managed. The QR code can be saved as a PNG and converted to vector by a designer. This is generally what I use to manage QR codes for campaigns as it’s clean, easy to use, provides basic analytics and it’s completely FREE. You can manage and track multiple QR code campaigns from one simple interface a no cost.

Asset Management. An issue that many organizations are very concerned with is asset management. How can we ensure the longevity of these QR codes? How do we carry them forward as staffing changes? Well, using many Google services generally requires a Google or Gmail user account. If your organization has implemented Google Apps services, your employees can login and access the Google’s services, developer tools, APIs and, yes, even the URL shortener, through a managed user account. Google Apps ranges from FREE to premium paid options so that small and large organizations can benefit. Let’s say that the employee managing your mobile campaigns and QR codes leaves the organization, the account and access can be delegated to another user. The QR codes are not lost and can continue to be managed by the new associate. This seems to be a rather useful (dare I say elegant) no or low cost option.

I hope that you find this info useful. Please post comments and feedback!